Universal Gravitation

Poem of the week - "Ozymandias" by Shelley

2012-02-22T10:19:00.000-06:00

Today we march into the land of familiarity. Most everyone has encountered this masterful sonnet written by a 26-year old Percy Shelley. Just because a poem has become high-school of Poetry 101 staple does not dilute its importance or its beauty. So sit back and enjoy the ride that is "Ozymandias":

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Why do I need to dress up for classical music?

2012-02-19T11:56:00.001-06:00

I am a big big fan of classical music in all its glory and magnificence. Be it the quiet yet forceful presence of a Chopin etude or the grand opulence of a Shostakovich symphony, each piece is a profound experience in and of itself.

I've been to many concerts, both back in LA and here in St. Louis, taking advantage of generous student discounts. And every time I get into a discussion about my sartorial choices. You see, I refuse to dress "up" for classical music. Instead of busting out my neatly pressed dress-shirt and red striped tie, I show up in my day-to-day outfit: jeans, sweater or a jacket, and a shirt.

I've asked many times why it is necessary to dress up for an event like this and have never received a convincing response. Here is a sample of responses I normally get:

"It's what people do."

"It's a form of respect."

"It's part of the culture."

What kind of lame BS is this? I show my utmost respect for the heavenly performance onstage by enthusiastically and sincerely clapping till my palms turn magenta. I show my respect by not talking. I show my respect by not being this dipshit who halted the entire New York Philharmonic mid-performance by pretending his phone wasn't ringing and not turning it off.

I am there to listen to great music, not to show off my new blue shirt.

People don't expect us to dress up for movies. Nor are we expected to dress up for rock concerts. Same goes for ball games, and every major type of performance. Then why insist on the same for classical music? In a day and age where classical music is fighting to maintain its position and dispel notions of elitism or snobbery, these artificial norms hardly do any favors.

The notion that one must dress up for a concert implies that classical music is somehow superior or more proper than other music. And that's wrong too. Don't get me wrong, I love listening to piano sonatas, symphonies and other works, but I don't think they are inherently superior to rock music or other more popular forms of music.

Anyway, time for me to get off my puny soapbox. Enough ranting about needless social conventions. Back to work.

Poem of the week - "Knowledge" by Philip Memmer

2012-01-28T15:19:00.002-06:00

I had not heard of Philip Memmer before this poem. A friend posted this poem on facebook, and I really liked it. Don't have anything more to add since I don't know much about Memmer or his style.

Knowledge

My philosopher friend is explaining again
that the bottle of well-chilled beer in my hand
might not be a bottle of beer,
that the trickle of bottle-sweat cooling in my palm
might not be wet, might not be cool,
that in fact it’s impossible ever to know
if I’m holding a bottle at all.
I try to follow his logic, flipping the steaks
that are almost certainly hissing
over the bed of coals – coals I’d swear
were black at first, then gray, then red –
coals we could spread out and walk on
and why not, I ask, since we’ll never be sure
if our feet burn, if our soles
blister and peel, if our faithlessness
is any better or worse a tool
than the firewalker’s can-do extreme.
Exactly, he smiles. Behind the fence
the moon rises, or seems to.
Have another. Whatever else is true,
the coals feel hotter than ever
as the darkness begins to do
what darkness does. Another what? I ask.

I sold my precious urine for $20

2012-01-22T12:47:00.000-06:00

So here's how it went: I met the guy in a parking lot, took a vial out and quickly exchanged it for a crumpled twenty....

Obviously that's not how it happened. That would be too easy and too convenient. Brace yourselves for the real story. If you are squeamish or weak of the heart, close the browser window now (or maybe you were about to do that anyway).

I surmounted unfathomable obstacles to win this rare honor. I had to vault over a herd of overeager first-years to grab this opportunity. I crushed hopes, mangled dreams on my way to the finish line. Bloodied and bruised but my spirit unbowed, I picked up the pen and signed myself up for a urine study sponsored by my renal physiology professor. Somewhere in the background, the "Rocky" theme song began playing spontaneously. Wiping the sweat off my glistening forehead, I sauntered out of the class like a champion, savoring the ruined landscape around me. And that is how it really happened.

Join me on Monday when I, along with 11 other vicious warriors from my class, piss every 30 minutes for 2 hours and give 4 10 ml samples for analysis. All for a $20 gift card to Panera. A lucky competitor will win an additional $20 for having the most concentrated urine.

Here are the tools of the competition: a beaker, a plastic test tube and a dropper.


Lethal weapons

Here are the rules:

1. Wake up Monday morning and measure volume of urine. Take 10 ml sample to class. DO NOT consume any liquid or food between then and class. Diuretics are forbidden.

2. Participants will be divided into three groups in class: dehydration, isotonic saline, and water. Each will consume (or not, if he/she is in the dehydration group) an amount of liquid proportional to one's body weight.

3. Every 30 minutes, each participant will visit the bathroom (or do it under a blanket, as was suggested by our professor) and bring back a 10 ml sample. A total of four samples will be collected.

4. Everyone will receive a $20 gift card to Panera (or St. Louis Bread Co., as it is known here) for his/her graciousness and magnanimity.

4. Results will be announced on Thursday. One with the most concentrated urine will be crowned champion for eternity and get exclusive rights to be called "ratboy" or "ratgirl" (apparently, kangaroo rats have very concentrated urine). The others will weep with despair and will be in a state of inconsolable grief.

Are you ready? I know I am.

What's happening this week

2012-01-16T20:41:00.002-06:00

Here's what's happening, man:

Girl Scouts cookies go on sale!!! (For the record, that is the most number of exclamation points I've ever used in my life in a single sentence) In less than four days, I will be able to stock up on Thanks-a-lots like there is no tomorrow. Starting tomorrow you may find me camped outside the local precinct. I am telling you, the very first box of cookies sold in the entire St. Louis metro area will be bought by me. Gotta get the fresh goods. Gunning.

Swing dancing. Coerced by a couple of my classmates and by my curious mind, I caved in and finally attended a swing dance session last Thursday. I was terrible on the floor and kept apologizing every two minutes for my colossal ineptitude. Swing dancing (supposedly the easiest form of ballroom dancing to learn) is tougher than med school (at least right now) but it also has the potential to be a lot more fun if I practice hard. Kinda looking forward to the second session this week.

I developed an interest in photography back in Dec 2010 and since then, I have taken quite a few pictures in different settings. Most of them have been seen only by friends and family. Starting tomorrow, two of my photos will be part of the WashU annual art show. Faculty and students submit their artwork and it is displayed for a month in the main atrium of the med school building. Here's one of the pictures I submitted. I took it during my road trip to northern California during last year's spring break.

Take home exam for physiology. The entire concept of take home exams may be foreign to undergraduates accustomed to high-pressure exams where every point counts towards the almighty grade. I've never taken a take home exam (hey two forms of take in one sentence!) before, so I am curious how this will be. We are currently studying respiratory physiology, which is dreadfully boring and severely counter-intuitive at times. I guess not having the stress of taking an in-class exam will be nice.

"My funny valentine" by Miles Davis

2012-01-12T15:30:00.000-06:00

Miles Davis was a pioneering jazz musician, trumpeter of highest caliber and an all-around badass. His innovations in the field of jazz inspired generations of musicians and have triumphantly stood the test of time. Davis swayed millions through his soulful instrumentals and maintained a famously flash lifestyle off the stage, riding around in Porsches and sporting stylish sunglasses.

"My funny valentine" is a well-known jazz standard that had been recorded many times by many different people before Davis recorded his take on it. Regardless, it sounds fresh. I like the arrangement of the piano (and the prominent part it takes towards the end) and the sombre interjections of the trumpet played by the master himself.

Anatomy professor stealing computers and other weird dreams

2012-01-11T23:01:00.001-06:00

Dreams. Topic of many senseless treatises, utterly worthless books and countless superstitions. Everyone from Sigmund Freud (dude, sometimes a pipe is just a pipe, ok?) to your best friend from fifth grade has tried to interpret these wisps of memories, with equal part trepidation and giddiness.

The funniest dreams are ones loaded with outrageous events. Events you 100% know would never ever happen in real life - even if pigs started flying and the sun came out in the west. Other interesting ones include those where I can tell I am in a dream with certainty but am still eager to see how they end.

It is always interesting to me to go back and try and reason out the dream. What piece of my daily life inspired this dream? Was it the conversation about Dexter that created a serial killer dream? Did the burrito I had for dinner made me dream about going to a crappy Taco Bell?

Here are couple recent ones that I thought were fantastically absurd:

---This one pertains to anatomy. We had 4 professors at hand for help and guidance during our dissection time. They usually went to different tables to check up on how things were going and offered to do parts of difficult dissections for us. They were all pretty colorful personalities. I guess something about spending a majority of your year among cadavers and bumbling med students makes you that way. Out of all 4, Dr. D was the most interesting. Trained in Bulgaria, he is a jack of all trades and loves to pepper his marathon table-side lectures with whimsical anecdotes.

Here's the dream now: we are all in a computer lab. All the students are just standing around or chatting. Dr. D was in his white lab coat, talking to other faculty. Suddenly a bunch of cops came in. One of them snapped cuffs on Dr. D and one of them started explaining how he was being arrested for stealing computers from the lab. We were all stunned and stared at the spectacle. The other professors just stood there, stone faced. And that's it. Dream ended. Pretty bizarre.

---In the second dream, a friend and I were talking. He was telling me a story about one of his friends who got a knee injury and was bleeding from it. When he looked into the mirror he saw something different. The bleeding appeared distorted and seemed nothing like real life. He also saw wispy entities hovering around the knee. I grew frustrated with all this talk of mirrors and their supposed supernatural connection and the following conversation ensued:

Me: What the hell, man. There is something called left-right parity. Mirrors are supposed to demonstrate symmetry. [I don’t even know what this means, but this is what I said in the dream]

Friend: Your face is not symmetric.

I hope scientists never figure out what precisely causes dreams. I would prefer that process remain shrouded in mystery forever. Knowing the mechanism of dreams will ruin all the fun.

Poem of the week - "Wires" by Philip Larkin

2012-01-11T22:13:00.003-06:00

Taking a break from Borges this week. Philip Larkin was a British poet and a somewhat morose, dude. Most of his poems deal with issues like getting old, forgetting things, and other such tragedies of life. Larkin didn't publish much in his lifetime and his entire production of poetry has been published as a slim book.

Without further ado here is "Wires":

The widest prairies have electric fences,

For though old cattle know they must not stray

Young steers are always scenting purer water

Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires

Leads them to blunder up against the wires

Whose muscles-shredding violence gives no quarter.

Young steers become old cattle from that day,

Electric limits to their widest senses.

Short, jarring ("muscles-shredding violence"), and downright gloomy. Just the way I like I poetry.

Pushing a car across two blocks in 19 degrees AKA a "warm" welcome back

2012-01-06T17:22:00.001-06:00

The lame bunny ears around warm in the title should clue you in that this is going to be about my return to frighteningly chilly St. Louis after an all-too-short winter break in improbably warm southern California.

(The weather here has improved dramatically, as if right on cue, but it was pretty awful the day I got back)

Block 2 at the med school started on Tuesday. My flight left LAX at 11:40 am on Monday. My last view of Los Angeles was a gloriously sunny cityscape with the Westin hotel at the center. Which is why I smiled a wry smile 4 hours later when I collected my bag and exited St. Louis airport, and was greeted by a blast of very cold air. My trusty iPhone informed me it was 19 degrees.

A cheery good evening to you too, St. Louis.

Later that night, I hitched a ride with couple friends from my class to Walmart. You see, Walmart is our fairy Godmother here. We drive out there and get down on our knees to beg for groceries (mostly Totino's frozen pizza and Ramen). And we are rewarded admirably. So just as usual we stacked up on life-sustaining merchandise and came back.

So far so mundane. Here's the twist: our driver's car broke down. At 10 pm. Right outside my apartment. He came upstairs to help me unload my stuff, and when he went down again his car wouldn't start. Uh oh.

Now let me name some names here. Let's call my driver friend LY and my other friend SR (I use initials partly because I want to, and partly because I am sure they would be too embarrassed to be associated with this flimsy blog.).

There we were, LY and I, scratching our chins and staring accusingly at the car. We called up SR mostly for moral support. He came over and almost immediately said, "Hey why don't we push this car back to your apartment. You can wait till tomorrow morning to call tow service." There was silence for about 8 seconds. We frowned, looked at each other and after some thought, agreed.

Why the hell not?

One man in the driver's seat (to steer), two at the back of the car to push. 30 minutes, 2 stoplights, a lot of hysterical laughter, and one difficult right turn later, we reached the promised land.

Guess what I crossed off my bucket list that night?

Poem of the week - "Things"

2011-12-31T21:12:00.000-06:00

I swear this is the last Borges poem for a while. I am going back to St. Louis on Monday and should start reading some other poetry pretty soon.

Things

My walking-stick, small change, key-ring,

The docile lock and the belated

Notes my few days left will grant

No time to read, the cards, the table,

A book, in its pages, that pressed

Violet, the leavings of an afternoon

Doubtless unforgettable, forgotten,

The reddened mirror facing to the west

Where burns illusory dawn. Many things,

Files, sills, atlases, wine-glasses, nails,

Which serve us, like unspeaking slaves,

So blind and so mysteriously secret!

They’ll long outlast our oblivion;

And never know that we are gone.

The phrase "unspeaking slaves" is eye-catching. Simple and lucid poem. Made me pause and think for a few moments at the end.

End of the year stuff

2011-12-31T02:18:00.003-06:00

Oh hey it's the end of yet another calender year. Time to do some retrospective type stuff. This was a big, nay, a giant year for me. Graduated from college, moved to a new state, started first year of medical school - pretty happening year. Events prior to my graduation in June appear way more distant than they actually are. Even though it has been only (!) six months since I graduated, it seems like an eternity ago. Everything before that is now shrouded in a sepia-tinted haze.

Enough reminiscing, however. Every newspaper, magazine and TV show does a Top 10 list right around this time. I am nowhere as significant as these luminaries of our mainstream media, so I will do a Top 4 list instead. I have given slightly more weight to books because reading is my preferred form of entertainment. Right then, here we go:

Top books that I read in 2011
(These are books I read, not ones that were published this year)

4. More Money Than God by Sebastian Mallaby: about the secretive hedge-fund industry, whose titans rake in eye-popping billions most years on intricate trades. For instance, one guy bought all the Palladium in Russia as part of a trade.

3. Chaos by James Gleick: "butterfly effect", fractals, Mandelbrot sets, colorful personalities and whimsical brainiacs make up this engrossing read about a fascinating field that can only be described as a hybrid of math and physics.

2. Patel: A Life by Rajmohan Gandhi: a superb biography about Sardar Patel, one of India's foremost political leaders who was instrumental in the country's fight for independence. He was a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi and played a crucial role in the early days of the nascent Democracy.

1. Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam: rockets, adversity, feel-good story. Hickam has a knack for making readers feel closer to characters. Boy growing up in the heart of coal country in the 50's dreams of working for NASA. Moving descriptions of a decaying town and a decaying industry and the perennial tussle between unions and bosses.

Top 4 movies I saw in 2011:

4. Crazy, Stupid, Love: good, goofy, light.

3. Muppets: surprisingly fresh, self-aware and incredibly clever.

2. Captain America: makes a worn out genre look compelling. self-deprecation, wit, sap all in the right amounts.

1. Moneyball: I don't even care about baseball, but this movie made baseball seem infinitely exciting. Quite an achievement. Brad Pitt gets a special mention for his acting.

Top 4 TV shows I followed in 2011:

4. Parks and Recreation: not as funny as the third season, but still miles ahead of its competitors

3. Justified: a trigger-happy US Marshal reluctantly returns to his native Kentucky to a whole host of professional and personal problems. Tremendous acting by the whole cast. Shout out to Timothy Olyphant for playing lead Raylan Givens.

2. The League: a bunch of douchebags obsessed with fantasy football and their antics each week. Extremely funny and original.

1. The Wire: Finally got around to finishing this epic that depicts life in a troubled Baltimore, and aspires to capture a snapshot of America in the process. A lot of internet space has been devoted by people far more accomplished about the virtues of this masterpiece. One of the best (if not the best) things ever made on TV. Everything about this show is perfect.

By the way, this was the 100th post for the year 2011.

The magic of sports radio

2011-12-30T02:05:00.002-06:00

For nearly two months in the summer of 2010 I commuted 65 miles from my home to LA daily for internship and research. I got into a set rhythm: I woke up at 5:15, was in the car and on the road by 5:45 armed with a tall mug of coffee. I would be in LA by 7:30 or 7:45 at the latest. I tried playing some of my music during this mind-numbing drive to entertain myself but soon ran out of good songs to play. That is when I walked down the dark murky path to sports talk radio.

710 ESPN is LA's self-professed sports leader and the official home of the much revered Lakers. In a couple days I knew the entire lineup: Mike and Mike in the morning followed by the irascible Colin Cowherd. Andrew Siciliano and former Laker Mychal (yes that is not a typo) Thompson took over till the afternoon. Steve Mason and John Ireland came on air from 3-6 and A Martinez (I never found out his true first name) and Brian Long wrapped up the evening.

I had a fun time listening to these guys banter and make awkward jokes. Andrew and Mychal were the funniest of them all, in my opinion. (sadly I found out about ten months ago that this show was replaced by the Max and Marcellus show) They squabbled like old married couple. Colin Cowherd was downright crazy and was never afraid to hide it.

Sports radio has a stigma attached to it. Print sports journalists malign it for sensationalizing sports and making a big deal out of non events. Radio hosts are blamed for playing the same audio clips over and over and for fawning over the people they interview or the teams their stations represent.

Now all of this definitely true. But that is the very nature of the beast. These guys have to be on air for hours. Unlike TV people, they don't have the added advantage of using visuals to capture the viewers' attentions. There are no fancy graphics or interactive animations. So what do they do? They talk in a highly animated voice. They produce exaggerated laughs. They make dramatic pauses. They take a non-incident and stretch it across shows - horse beaten to death by M&M at 6 am would be resurrected by Mason and Ireland at 5:30 pm without any shame. A big part of these shows was taking calls from listeners. You'd have Randy from Burbank calling in to wax poetic about his brand of run-defense for the new-look Washington Redskins. Or Robert from Chatsworth expressing his fears over "Paulina" Gasol and "Andrea" Bynum (this was a real call, BTW - not making it up). If a guy blabbered too much, the hosts would swiftly cut his call. You can't cede control to armchair offensive coordinators, after all.

And that was the fun of it. A nice little ecosystem built entirely around sports its primary food source. They made my otherwise excruciating commute bearable. I was still pretty freaking exhausted every time I came home in the evening, but at least I didn't want to bash my head in.

Poem of the week: "Remorse" by Borges

2011-12-23T18:43:00.002-06:00

It's time for another edition of Poem of the Week. I have been reading some more poems by Borges, and have realized two things:

1. The man writes about very somber, depressing stuff

2. He's a damn fine poet

Here's "Remorse":

Remorse

I have committed the worst sin of all
That a man can commit. I have not been
Happy. Let the glaciers of oblivion
Drag me and mercilessly let me fall.
My parents bred and bore me for a higher
Faith in the human game of nights and days;
For earth, for air, for water, and for fire.
I let them down. I wasn’t happy. My ways
Have not fulfilled their youthful hope. I gave
My mind to the symmetric stubbornness
Of art, and all its webs of pettiness.
They willed me bravery. I wasn’t brave.
It never leaves my side, since I began:
This shadow of having been a brooding man.

I was curious why Borges, a man adored, imitated and worshiped by legions for his talents, would consider himself a disappointment. His choice of words - "wed of pettiness" and "I wasn't brave" - reflects a profound unease with his chosen role as a man of letters. This poem is not just some forty-something guy looking back and making a baleful list of things undone, words unsaid. It's someone thinking his whole life has been a grand exercise in futility. I dug around the bowels of the internet some more, and found this quote in his biography: "As most of my people had been soldiers and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action." Very unsettling. And sad.

Review - Sherlock Holmes: A game of shadows

2011-12-21T01:12:00.003-06:00

I went to watch Sherlock Holmes 2 with some degree of enthusiasm. The inevitable "sequel letdown" phenomenon notwithstanding (Godfather 2 and the Star Wars sequels are some rare exceptions to this phenomenon), I was expecting a good performance by RDJ, whose portrayal of Holmes in the first film I thoroughly enjoyed.

However, I was disappointed by the movie, not because it is bad (in fact, it is an entertaining flick on the whole) but because it bills itself as something it is not. It purports to be a Sherlock Holmes movie, but apart from character names and very loose plot points, it does not resemble or faithfully represent any element of the original stories. The Holmes I grew up to enjoy and worship is a Holmes who solves cases by thinking. He listens to his clients and shuts himself up in his room, emerging only to use Watson as a sounding board. He does not like to leave his apartment and detests most forms of human contact, and engages in both of these activities only when absolutely necessary. Although an accomplished fighter, he never fights and I vaguely recall only two (maybe three) stories where he chases someone. To be fair, the first movie did away with a lot of these character traits mostly because of pragmatic and commercial concerns (a movie showing RDJ brooding on a divan playing shitty violin wouldn't be as fun, nor would it rake in half a billion dollars), and I understand that. When you make a movie, your primary goal is to broaden the audience for the story you are basing the movie on and make money.

But the second movie did away with Holmesianisms out of pure recklessness. They knew they could get away with it. Instead of a well-designed story, we get a corny plot (world domination! Europe on the brink of mechanized war!) that lurches from one European locale to another with little logic or explanation. There are a lot of fight scenes, an obligatory train scene, and and extended escape from the ~~dungeon of doom~~ munitions factory scene. And slow motion. Lots and lots of slow motion. Director Guy Ritchie must have a fetish for slow-mo - how else would you explain that there is a slow-mo scene roughly every 12 minutes?

The movie does have some redeeming qualities. ~~Lane Pryce~~ Jared Harris does a splendid job as Professor Moriarty, and Stephen Fry makes the most of his portrayal of Mycroft, Sherlock's elder brother ("I am the other Holmes", he chortles at one point).

Bottom line: if you go in expecting a movie that tries its best to balance SH plot points with mass audience pleasing action montages, you will be angry. If you want a generic, snazzy action flick with character names that resemble those created by Arthur Conan Doyle, you'll be fine.

Poem of the week

2011-12-15T13:28:00.000-06:00

I may have mentioned somewhere on the blog that I don't read much poetry. I will read the occasional good poem I happen to stumble upon, but I don't systematically sit down with a collection of poems and blaze through them.

I am making a conscious effort to alter my reading habits and include more poetry. In the past, the barrier was always finding good poets. Recently I found out that one of my classmates here is an avid poetry reader, and a big fan of T.S. Eliot. I struck up a conversation with him and he recommended a few good collections. In fact, he lent me a copy of a collection of sonnets by Borges.

So here's the plan: as I go through these poems (and hopefully more in the future), I will copy one poem a week, and maybe say a few things about that poem.

Here's this week's poem:

The Mirror
-Jorge Luis Borges

As a child I feared the mirror might reveal
Another face, or make me see a blind
Impersonal mask whose blankness must conceal
Something horrible, no doubt. I also feared
The silent time inside the looking glass
Might meander from the ordinary stream
Of mundane human hours, and harbor deep
Within its vague, imaginary space
New-found beings, colors, unknown shapes.
(I spoke of this to no one; children are shy.)
Now I fear the mirror may disclose
The true, unvarnished visage of my soul,
Bruised by shadows, black and blue with guilt -
The face God sees, that men perhaps see too.

Mirrors have triumphantly entrenched themselves in our society. Our apartments, houses, what-have-yous are all studded with mirrors of all sizes, shapes and contours. They serve as excellent plot devices in dramas as well as in horror flicks. As a child, I imagined that a whole "parallel" world existed beyond the mirror. Learning about angles of incidence and angles of reflection in school took away the magic of the mirror, and now it's there to remind me to shave under the jaw twice and taunt me by revealing the two strands of grey hair that I have sprouted lately. In the poem I like the rough, abrupt transition from describing a child's innocent imagination to the frank disclosure of the darkness of adulthood ("Now I fear...").

Next week I will another one.

Homestretch

2011-12-15T13:09:00.000-06:00

Just like that, first semester of med school is almost over. Only histology stands in the way of unbridled bliss. This past week was a very typical exam week: dazed looks on people's faces as the clock raced toward midnight and beyond, the alarmingly nocturnal lifestyle most of us adopted, gleeful food runs to the cafeteria where we out competed one another in choosing the least healthy foods.

I really didn't study with other people in undergraduate, so I never got to experience the communal studying environment until now. And I like it a lot. It helps that all of us are taking the same classes and are going through the same sorts of problems in trying to learn/retain the material.

That's all I have to say for now. I need to go clean up the apartment and pack my bags for my trip back home for the break. No post about academics is complete without the cliched "I can't believe how fast time flies" sentiment. So there you have it: I can't believe I am done with first semester. Pretty crazy.

Vladimir Putin is a man of many talents

2011-12-05T00:40:00.001-06:00

Russian Prime Minister (and soon to be President again) Vladimir Putin is a man of many talents. A super master spy, martial arts expert, political manipulator, Siberian tiger hunter and so on. Add pianist and singer to that list. I spotted this youtube a while ago. Putin and other glitterati were attending a charity concert when he was invited to sing on stage. Epicness ensued:

Sunday saxophone

2011-12-04T01:58:00.000-06:00

I am a huge fan of the saxophone (wish I could play it). It has a very soulful, evocative tone that stirs deep emotions and induces a blissful reverie. I could spend hours listening to the great John Coltrane on the sax.

Although the guitar doesn't usually match up to the sax in terms of depth (with a few exceptions - see Hotel California), the combination of these two wonderful instruments in famous rock songs has produced some very legendary tunes.

The first one is Pink Floyd's "Money". Apparently it is the only song with a 7/8 time, whatever the hell that means (I am ignorant when it comes to the theory of music). The guitar work is impressive, but it's the brief sax interlude that steals the thunder. Absolutely mesmerizing:

The Rolling Stones abused their fair share of guitars during their heyday to produce some classic tunes, and they also produced this kickass track with a very characteristic sax part. The sax in "Brown Sugar" is irreverent and flamboyant, much like the Stones themselves.

Finally, here is Bill Clinton playing a surprisingly good rendition of Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" in 1992. Clinton, the young, charismatic governor of Arkansas, was running for the presidency and made an appearance on the Arsenio Hall show to woo the youth of the day. Look at him rock those stunner shades:

Updates from under the pile

2011-11-15T20:52:00.001-06:00

My last post was more than a month and bucketfuls of optimism ago. Back then I believed I would be able to keep up with this on a very regular basis, both because it is relaxing to post stuff on this blog and because I thought I would have time to think of new and creative things to talk about. Like many times before, I was wrong.

I got buried under a pile of schoolwork. Anatomy (as I indicated in my previous posts) took up the most time. But of course I can't abandon this blog. So here are a few rapid fire updates of my non-spectacular life over the last month or so:

One of the coolest things I learned in anatomy was the organization, function and innervation of muscles in the upper and lower limbs. While I knew the basic outline of the major muscles (biceps, triceps etc.), it was very neat to learn about the muscles that move the hand (wrist, thumbs, fingers). There are about 50 muscles in the upper limb, and an astonishing 28 of them work to move some part of the hand. Finer movements of the hand are very important to our day to day life and allow us to perform many amazing feats that other animals cannot (think about Hendrix plucking the string of a guitar or van Gogh painting one of his many masterpieces) These are movements you are not even conscious of performing. Like for instance, just now, I typed out a sentence of the laptop without even realizing I used, among others,(I am gonna show off a bit now) the lumbricals, abductor pollicis longus, opponens pollicis, and a whole bunch of flexors and extensors.

I have taken up cubing. If you are going "huh?", cubing is a sport (any activity that has a word organization to regulate it is a sport) that involves solving the Rubik's cube (allegedly the best selling puzzle of all time, and the lazy film writer's prop of choice to depict nerddom).I was a bit into those cubes about 5-6 years ago and was able to solve them by following algorithms, but never really bothered to memorize them. Now I am determined to memorize the algorithms. Solving the cube is not that hard, really. The simplest method probably involves memorizing just about 6 algorithms. That's it. You could probably solve it in about 3 minutes with the simplest method. To get fast at it, now that's a whole different game. That takes amazing pattern recognition skills, very nimble fingers (there's those pesky muscles again!) and superhuman spatial skills. The world record currently is 5.66 seconds. People who can solve the cube in less than 25 seconds typically memorize about 60-80 algorithms. I am currently working on an intermediate method that involves only 15 algs. Will gradually progress to more advanced methods to improve my time.

A year ago, the Niners were the laughingstock. In a otherwise shitty NFC West, they were the champions of shit. They unceremoniously sacked their coach mid-season, (one of) their quarterbacks had a spectacular meltdown on the sidelines, and they looked like a cause very much lost. And look at them now. 8-1 and sitting at the top of the freakin' world. On the flip side, the Eagles were supposed to be legit superbowl contenders this season: a string of high-profile off-season acquisitions, an explosive quarterback aided by eager receivers, they had it all. They are 3-6 now, and will be incredibly lucky even to win a wild card spot.

Finally, a word about this blog. I seriously intend to keep it going, and while I can't promise daily updates, I can promise this: I will post something substantial at least twice a week. Look out for at least one more post later this week.

A few thoughts on anatomy

2011-10-11T01:22:00.000-05:00

In my last post providing an overview of med school and classes and such, I promised a separate post just for anatomy because I like it so much. So here we go.

Anatomy more or less dominates our first block of classes. We have three lectures a week, each followed by a marathon session in the dissection lab. There are four students per body, meaning there is plenty of work cut out for everyone. A dedicated brigade of professors (some of whom are reportedly renowned experts in their fields) and TAs roams around to provide assistance to floundering groups or to regale the idle ones with grand stories about exciting discoveries in the field of anatomy. The lab is akin to a bazaar, full of boisterousness and healthy chaos.

Of course that's not how we felt the day before our first class at all. Notorious anatomy horror stories had trickled down from upperclassmen - accidentally perforated bowels, the pernicious odor of formalin, and so on - and none of us was looking forward to the coming weeks. Nearly two months in, my views have changed completely. Anatomy is my favorite class right now.

It is hard to appreciate the full glory of anatomy when you are kneading through peritoneal fat and layers of mesentery within the abdominal cavity in a Herculean effort to locate the celiac trunk. Or when you are making your very first incision along the sternal border of the pectoralis major muscle to expose the rib cage. It all seems too much and much too pointless.

The road to the elusive treasure (the celiac trunk or the heart buried deep within the mediastinum) is paved with muscle, fat, vasculature, and other unassorted gunk, and many a times you feel like giving up, to fling away your shovels and tear up your maps. You want to turn around and go home.

But the rewards at the end are huge and very well compensate for all the hardships. You peel off the pec major, crack each rib one by the one, lift up the rib cage, reflect the pericardium (and clean up any fat), and all of a sudden you are there - the heart. There it sits, all solemn and majestic, flanked by the two phrenic nerves. Your fingers tremble slightly as you gingerly poke it. All of a sudden you realize that this very exact organ has been beating ceaselessly and unfailingly since your birth. Hyperawareness.

It is a transformative experience. On the very first day of lecture, the professor boldly declared, "What you are about to do would most certainly land you in jail were it not done under the auspices of your training. Society has granted you a special privilege. Don't take it lightly." He then read a poem from a son of body donors who reveals his parents did so against his wishes. In the poem, the son urges med students to treat each body with the same respect and dignity accorded to a living patient.

Now you may think this is all sappy and corny. Whether you choose to accept the symbolism and the significance of dissecting human bodies, mangling their organs, the fact remains that this is a unique learning experience, not to be replicated by any other med school class. For the vast majority of us, in fact, this will be the one of the few opportunities to "handle" organs and actually peek inside bodies.

Organs packed compactly, tucked away neatly over each other, intricate vasculature with each vein and artery striving to cover every possible area, layers of muscle thoughtfully overlapping skin and underlying viscera - anatomy never ceases to amaze me.

Tomas Transtromer and his exciting poetry

2011-10-11T00:41:00.000-05:00

Although I like poetry, I don't dabble in it (or feel as confident about) like I do in literature. Good poetry is harder to find than good fiction because every person with the slightest bit of angst and the teeniest degree of creativity jumps recklessly into the realm of the verse. Whereas bad fiction merely annoys, bad poetry provokes. I feel like hurling the book against the wall whenever I encounter a bad poem. With bad fiction, I merely shrug, grit my teeth a little bit and put the book away.

Poetry is a medium that achieves (or at least aims to achieve) a lot more with the very few. Whenever you try to express yourself among the confines of meter and rhyme while trying to construct a lyrical backbone (not that any of these are needed for poetry - they just happen to be the most common features), you run the risk of sounding either too shallow or just plain shitty.

Fiction offers the comfortable cushion of unlimited words and offers complete freedom. The whole wide green pastures are yours. The cushion of words masks mediocre fiction much more easily, and that is why I don't feel as much pain while reading bad fiction.

So it is natural that I get terribly excited when I meet a particularly good piece of poetry. Case in point: Mr. Tomas Transtromer, the newly minted Nobel laureate in literature.
TT is the first Swede to win the prize in some 40 years. Apparently, he was a perennial favorite throughout the 90's, but never got his chance. Until last week. I am a proud Nobel prize geek and the literature prize is the one I eagerly await, because it introduces me to new genres, new authors and new themes. After the prize was announced, blogs and newspapers published samples of TT's poems. TT explores the theme of humans vs. nature in the modern society and has written on seemingly non-lyrical topics like national security.

Here are two of his poems that I found particularly striking:

National Insecurity
The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X
and her ear-drops dangle like swords of Damocles.
As a mottled butterfly is invisible against the ground
so the demon merges with the opened newspaper.
A helmet worn by no one has taken power.
The mother-turtle flees flying under the water.

Allegro
I play Haydn after a black day
and feel a simple warmth in my hands.

The keys are willing. Soft hammers strike.
The resonance green, lively, and calm.

The music says freedom exists
and someone doesn't pay the emperor tax.

I push down my hands in my Haydnpockets
and imitate a person looking on world calmly.

I hoist the Haydnflag––it signifies:
"We don't give in. But want peace."

The music is a glass-house on the slope
where the stones fly, the stones roll.

And the stones roll right through
but each pane stays whole.

Tomas Tranströmer - Allegro (2)
Translated from the Swedish by May Swenson and Leif Sjöberg

I play Haydn after a black day
and feel a simple warmth in by hands.

The keyboard is willing. Mild hammers strike.
The sound is green, lively tranquil.

The sound says that freedom exists,
that someone does not pay Caesar's tax.

I put my hands in by Haydn-pockets
and pretend to take a cool look at the world.

I hoist the Haydn-flag––it indicates:
"We won't surrender. But want peace."

Music is a glass house on the hillside
where stones fly, stones crash.

And the stones crash straight through glass,
but the house remains whole.

The humdrum and the minutiae

2011-10-07T00:47:00.000-05:00

We've been in school for one and a half months now, and have settled into a good routine involving classes, social events and studying. Our school year is divided into three blocks and we are currently in the middle of our first block. Second block starts after Christmas break and third block after spring break. Pretty much like the quarter system, except first block is longer by more than a month (instead of starting late September, like most quarter system schools do, we started mid August).

First block consists of the following five classes: Anatomy, Histology, Physiology, Molecular Foundations of Medicine and Practice of Medicine.

Histology and physiology are rolled into one neat package called Cell and Organ System Bio (I don't know why they needed to do that, but I guess it looks fancier on brochures and class schedules). Histology is about looking at slides of tissue preparations under microscopes and identifying cells, structures etc. Most of us are not able to discern much. Everything is a different shade of pink or purple with random blobs and splotches thrown in. It's like looking at a work of modern art, really. Physiology is more palatable because some of it, like action potentials and membrane potentials, is familiar territory.

Molecular Foundations of Medicine - MFM, for short - as intimidating or grandiose as it sounds, is just your garden variety biochemistry garnished with a slice of cell biology. Lots of good stuff about Receptor Tyrosine Kinases, Glycolysis, Gluconeogenesis etc.

Practice of Medicine is a clinical skills class. More and more medical schools are pushing to expose their students to patients as early as possible. By second week, we had acquired shiny new stethoscopes from Littman (a subsidiary of 3M - seriously, is there anything this behemoth does not make?); our first patient encounter was during week four, where we took a detailed medical history and took basic vitals. Since we are still too inexperienced (and thereby, somewhat dangerous), the school brings in trained actors to pose as patients for the majority of our practice sessions. Whenever we do see actual patients, it is under the watchful guidance of fourth year medical students (who look so knowledgeable and God-like to us minions) and attendings. POM is actually a very interesting class. So far I've learned to measure blood pressure properly, listen for various heart sounds, find various pulses throughout the body, and do patient write-up in a semi-decent manner.

This brings me to anatomy. Anatomy is my favorite class. It is a treasure hunt - persistence and resourcefulness are absolutely needed if one wants to dig up that proverbial pot of gold. In fact, since I like anatomy so much, I will do a separate post just on how important and significant it is.

Finally a word about life here in general. All throughout undergraduate, I had roommates. Some were excellent (particularly during my senior year), some were mediocre. I did not want to deal with potential problems with roommates in medical school so I opted to live in a studio. It has worked out great. I love being alone, the master of the domain, so to speak. I don't have to keep anyone's schedules and I can hog the bathroom and the TV for as long as I want. The lights can stay on as long as I damn please, and my stuff can lie around without anyone bothering me about it. Most of my classmates live within easy walking distance so I don't miss out on anything much.

St. Louis is an active, vibrant city with a lot to "do". I put do in quotation marks because I am not really snooty or picky about the wining and dining scene, but there is stuff for those who are. The neighborhood around medical school is called Central West End (or CWE) and it has a bunch of restaurants, bars and apartments. The neighborhood around the undergraduate campus (about two train stops away) is called the Loop. The Loop has a lot more to offer. I have been there a few times, mostly to shoot some darts at this nice diner/bar/dance club.

Weather's nice (so far) and it is not as hot as it was last month. But you know what they say - winter's coming.

Boast of quietness

2011-10-04T23:40:00.000-05:00

Since I have so much free time on my hands these days, I spend it on the treadmill. When I am not wasting my time watching Anthony Bourdain spout gibberish ("This bread is France and France is bread") on the gym TVs, I listed to audiobooks while running.

One of the recent books I was (and still am) listening to is Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss. It won a Booker prize and Desai has some pedigree - her mother Anita Desai is a famous novelist - so I decided to check it out. The book is meant to represent class struggle and the aspirations of the poor, both through the perspective of a retired judge clashing with local goons in India and an illegal immigrant trying to make it big in America.

Although the book has been a bit overly melodramatic and slightly clunky so far, a verse in the preface struck me deeply. I was running along when the narrator began speaking the following lines:

My homeland is the rythym of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,
the willow grove's visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensible, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away
he doesn't expect to arrive.

I was so impressed by the tenderness and the heaviness of these words that I nearly fell off the treadmill (no joke). I was truly impressed by Desai's writing (And this is only the preface! Lots more to come! I thought to myself), when the narrator finished reading and intoned, "Jorge Luis Borges."

I felt like smacking my head. Of course. Desai is good, but definitely not that good.

Now I wanted to hunt down the whole poem. Google helped me out with that. The verse is part of a poem called "Boast of quietness". Here is the thing in whole:

Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigous than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious
and would like to understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rythym of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,
the willow grove's visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensible, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away
he doesn't expect to arrive.

Absolutely beautiful. Such empathy, understanding and perceptiveness.

A month's worth of newness

2011-09-17T01:45:00.000-05:00

Well it’s been more than month since I have posted anything here and it’s damn well about time I changed that. I have been incredibly busy and have been totally absorbed by medical school and all the burdens that go with moving to a totally new place and getting adjusted to living there. But now I have begun to settle down into a fairly convenient routine and can give a good retrospect of the month that just passed.

On August 8, I boarded a painfully early morning flight from Los Angeles to St. Louis to start medical school at Washington University. The founders of my school must have been fond of misunderstandings, since its name provokes a lot of confusion.

“Is it in Washington?”

“Is it in Washington, D.C.?”

These are the two most common follow-up questions I get whenever I talk to someone not in the medical community. No wonder that in 1976, the Regents of the university finally sneaked in the qualifier “in St. Louis” to the school’s name to make it “Washington University in St. Louis.”

Usually its shortened to either WashU or WUStL.

BTW if you haven’t got it by now, the school was named after our first president.

Orientation was from August 9-12. I was at a slight advantage at meeting a lot of my new classmates because more than half of the class had arrived in St. Louis early to do a week-long community health program. First day went by fairly briskly, and I spent an awful lot of time shaking hands and smiling and introducing myself. The two most common questions following introductions – “Where are you from?” and “Where did you do your undergrad?”

If time permitted, these were usually followed by “Where are you living right now?”

That evening, the school rented out the entire City Museum from 6-9 and threw a lavish reception party, replete with an open bar and a generous dinner. This was the type of affair with waiters circulating in and out of crowds, carrying trays laden with delicious appetizers and some kind of wine. The entire top brass showed up, and the Dean of admissions was seated at my table. I was awestruck. This man was literally directly responsible for my admission to the school. He was my interviewer way back in November of last year, and he was the one I wrote to express my interest after being waitlist. And he was the one who called me the next day to announce the happy news.

There were four other students at the table, and the talk turned to California. My class has a lot of Californians. The Dean made a joke about it: “When the creator made the world, he/she took the whole North American landmass and shook it thoroughly, and all the nuts fell down to California.”

Hey-O!

The rest of the orientation days were, sadly, neither as eventful nor as exciting. We were bombarded with lectures and protocols and forms. Orientation culminated in what has now become a standard practice among medical schools, the white coat ceremony. It is a fairly recent tradition (Wikipedia tells me it was first introduced in late 1980’s) that marks the initiation of new medical students into the medical community. Each student is given a white coat and the class as a whole recites an oath to uphold the principles of medicine.

WashU makes us construct our own oath, partly because the Hippocratic oath is terribly outdated (it includes clauses like "to live in common with him[i.e. teacher] and, if necessary, to share my goods with him; To look upon his children as my own brothers, to teach them this art." ) and partly because the school acknowledges that while the main tenets of medicine may not change, each new generation of physicians-to-be brings its own set of ideals.

For that purpose, we were split into small groups. Each group, under the guidance of a faculty mentor, spent two hours brainstorming various ideas worthy of including in the oath. Two representatives were appointed from each group, and all the representatives met again to write the final product. If anyone is interested, here is the oath in full: Oath.

Now normally, I am faintly leery of such displays of solemnity because I think people take them for granted, thus diluting the significance of these events. However, I was very impressed with the gravitas and authenticity of the whole ceremony. Granted, we are all at a very young stage in our careers, but the boisterious idealism on display at the white coat ceremony is necessary to sustain the tough years ahead. Plus, everyone’s parents had a nice reason to feel happy and overwhelmed, which is always good. This post has grown too long already, and I will talk about classes, daily life etc. in my next post.

On the Road - 11: Viva Las Vegas

2011-08-04T20:34:00.000-05:00

On a sweltering July 27, I set off for a mini-vacation to Las Vegas. With me in the car were two friends, M. and R., both of whom I have known for more than fifteen years. We packed our car wisely: a half-eaten box of Pappa John's finest, two mountainous crates of bottled water ("buy one get one free" at Rite-Aid), a dazzling array of beverages thoughtfully buried in chips of ice in a giant cooler, and two ipods filled with road trip-appropriate music.

This was R's first time to Vegas so he was very excited. He kept asking all sorts of questions, most pertinent, others not so much. Pretty soon we were out on the Interstate 15, going a leisurely 80 miles and admiring the scenery. The land out there is so bleak and so vast that it naturally inspires awe and a deep sense of isolation. The mountains that crop up alarmingly close to the roadside are stark and stern, studded with harsh rocks and nothing else.

While I was busy driving, M. snapped pictures from the passenger seat.

3.5 hours and multiple iterations of "Hotel California" later, the Vegas skyline emerged triumphantly from the desert. I have been to Vegas before, but each time I go I feel the same feeling of contentment at the first sight of the skyline. Vegas has a rejuvenating quality to it. The city itself is nothing short of a miracle, prospering (although not so much in the recent years) in the middle of the desert and being an evergreen hope-refueling station for millions for decades. During day it looks surprisingly ordinary. At night, with all the lights turned on in their full glory, it transforms into an astonishing world, one that is self-contained and endless at the same time. It is earnest without being too ironic. Which is why it is able to pull off showy gimmicks without seeming kitschy. Where else would you be able to visit a replica of the Eiffel Tower or see a miniature Statue of Liberty or a giant-ass Sphinx without lapsing into peals of derisive laughter? Vegas takes itself seriously, and that compels you to do the same. True, its unabashedly consumerist and capitalist nature turns many away, but the beauty of the strip is it offers something for everybody. You can manage to have a terrific time without once having to gamble. Or drink. Just walking around and seeing the charged crowds gliding on the hot concrete is enough to get the adrenaline going. I have walked many many miles on UCLA's campus over the last four years, but none of them can beat the walks I have taken on the illuminated strip at midnight.

We were staying at the Monte Carlo. For some reason checking in at Vegas hotels takes a shit load of time. You are waiting and waiting and waiting for eternity. There were a bunch of French tourists in line ahead of me and when it was their turn at the judgement desk, things stalled. The dude working the counter mysteriously disappeared in some office, taking a sheaf of passports with him.

I switched lines twice before I could reach the desk. By the time I was done, I had been in line for more than twenty minutes. Do you realize the significance of that? Monte Carlo robbed me of twenty minutes, twenty glorious minutes which I could have used to bankrupt half the freaking strip. By the way, I peeked at my French friends as I ducked into the elevators. They were still patiently waiting at their desk. No sign of the dude who took their passports and slipped into his office.

My buddy M. was pretty critical of our room. It was tucked away in the nether regions of the fourth floor with a gloomy view of maintenance pipes and heating ducts. I guess he was expecting a presidential suite view. Since we weren't going to be in the room for that much anyway, I wasn't too concerned.

Here's a pic of our hotel:

Monte Carlo's location is pretty convenient. Across from MGM and next to New York New York, it is not too far from the strip's more coveted casinos like Bellagio, Caesar's and the Venetian.The Monte Carlo is owned by MGM Resorts International, a massive conglomerate that practically owns half the strip.

Our adventures for the next two days were fairly ordinary and don't involve any tigers, missing teeth or hilarious cameos by boxing legends. I will skip a lot of boring crap and focus on three experiences that stand out:

Vegas is the last place I would expect to discuss cricket with anyone. And yet that is precisely what happened. We decided to have lunch in our hotel's restaurant. As we were settling down, our server approached R. and asked, "You are Indian, right?" I whiffed a strong English accent. Without waiting for confirmation he went on, now addressing all of us, "You guys follow cricket at all? What about the current India-England test series, eh?" He was positively gleaming with delight as he finished his question. You see, India is touring England for two months and they are engaged in a bitter dual to decide who will inherit the World No. 1 crown. He then beckoned another server, an Indian, and told us how they always tease each other about the game and all that. After we paid our bill, he came to us again and confided his feelings about Australians. Australia dominated world cricket for much of the 90's and were horrible bullies on the field for most of their time at the top. The Brits and Australians have an intense rivalry that goes well beyond the scope of cricket. So I wasn't too shocked when he said, "Glad to see the Australians down. Those guys are practically animals. Animals, I tell you."

The Monte Carlo is home to the Minus 5 ice bar, the second of its kind on the strip. Entry starts at $15 and includes rental jackets and boots. Everything inside - chairs, tables, walls, sculptures, the bar - is made of ice. Even glasses. We were giddy with excitement when we put our jackets and boots on. A blast of intensely chilly air greeted us warmly. The bartender, shockingly, was dressed in jeans and a threadbare sweatshirt. "I'm from North Dakota and I was unemployed for a long time. Seen it all. The cold doesn't bother me much", he said as a way of explanation to all the incredulous looks he was getting. A great experience.

The Stratosphere at night

The Stratosphere is a 1149 ft tall tower located at the northern end of the strip. Its 107th and 109th floors offer stunning vistas of the whole strip. The top of the tower houses three thrill rides (all out in the open) that supposedly take riders to the brink of oblivion. Recklessness being my middle name, I was salivating at the prospect of visiting. We trooped up to the hotel, bought our tickets, and semi-patiently waited in line. M. chickened out and just flat out refused to board any of the rides at the top of the tower. So R. and I, the two brave souls, had to make the journey alone. First, a word about the view: sublime. Absolutely sublime. An unbeatable feeling of being at the top of the world.

Here are some other random pictures from the strip that I took with my fancy camera. Vegas offers a lot of great picture opportunities, and it was one of the things that I was looking forward to doing. I was satisfied with the pictures I was able to take.

The fountains at Bellagio: the best damn dance show in all of Las Vegas

A great end to my last true summer vacation for a long, long while. Just the kind of boost I needed before medical school. Bring it on!